What Happened?
The Internet Archive, a cornerstone of digital preservation and home to the Wayback Machine, experienced a catastrophic data breach on Wednesday. 31 million users' passwords were stolen.
The attack compromised email addresses, screen names, and encrypted passwords, prompting cybersecurity experts to urge users to change their passwords immediately.
How it Happened?
It is not known how the threat actors breached the Internet Archive and if any other data was stolen.
The BlackMeta hacktivist group claimed that the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack.
Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle shared an update on X, confirming the data breach and stating that the threat actor used a JavaScript library to show the alerts to visitors.
"What we know: DDOS attacked-fended off for now; defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords," reads a first status update tweeted last night.
"What we've done: Disabled the JS library, scrubbing systems, upgrading security."
How SafeLine WAF Can Help Prevent Similar Data Breach
SafeLine was created to provide a free WAF easy to deploy, configure and use, with low rate of false positives. It's based on docker and can be deployed with a single command. SafeLine leverages a patented semantic analysis smart engine to detect 0 day attacks and to improve the overall detection accuracy, with no negative impact on business as well.
In terms of the data breach of Internet Archive, what SafeLine WAF can do before the security incident is to prevent DDoS attack such as CC attack by rate limiting and provide dynamic protection to encrypt HTML and JavaScript code in your web server each time you visit.
SafeLine Rate Limiting
Before Encrypted
After Encrypted
Conclusion
The Internet Archive data breach underscores the critical need for robust cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive data and maintain service availability.
By implementing SafeLine WAF, organizations can effectively prevent DoS and DDoS attacks such as CC attack, and encrypt HTML and JavaScipt code in your web server each time you visit to prevent data breach.
As cyber threats continue to evolve, proactive measures like deploying a comprehensive WAF solution are essential in safeguarding against potential breaches and attacks.
Top comments (1)
Yet here's how we could have prevented it!
Getting kinda sick of these Safeline adverts..